Volume 16, no. 1:

Francesca
Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. By Suzanne G. Cusick. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. (xxxvi, 445 pp., accompanying
CD, ISBN 978-0-226-13212-9. $60.)

1.1 I have been
waiting for Chapter 10 of Suzanne Cusicks Francesca Caccini at the Medici
Court: Music and the Circulation of Power for twenty years.

1.2 In her introductory
notes, Cusick tells her reader of a significant moment in her historiographical
trajectory, when she decided to go public with her gender-grounded approach
to Francesca Caccinis life and work. The resulting presentation at the 1989
AMS meeting in Baltimore—a preliminary version of the complex and
compelling analytical argument that forms the core of Cusicks Chapter 10,
Performance, Musical Design, and Politics in La liberazione di Ruggiero—was
absolutely riveting to a young graduate student, whose scholarly imagination
was arguably more shaped by the nuanced flow of Cusicks talk than by the more
provocative and renowned paper on gendered musical rhetoric in Monteverdis Orfeo that was also featured at that meeting and was later published in what has to
be acknowledged as the most influential volume on gender and musicology.1 That former graduate student is now privileged to review a book that many of us
have been eagerly anticipating for a very long time, and there is no question
that it was truly worth the wait.

2. Famiglie
Femminili

2.1 Some of the
perspectives presented in Cusicks book are not foreign to those of us who have
been following her groundbreaking scholarship on music and gender in early
modern Italy.2 However, the level of detail and historiographical thickness afforded by the
book-length format provides a perspective on the biographical and creative
trajectory of Caccini and her famiglia—both in the
early-modern-courtly sense and the more modern biological one—that is
simultaneously well synchronized with Cusicks other work (she has resisted a
temptation that is all too common in our field, in that the reader will find
surprisingly little in the way of factual duplication of her earlier essays on
Caccini) and remarkable for its ability to open new models of historical
narrative.

2.2 As Cusick
tells us in her introduction, she has chosen to sandwich four chapters that
provide close readings of Caccinis music between two narrative arcs that trace
her biography, but the story neither begins with Caccini nor ends with her. Rather,
Cusick gives us insights into the lives of several women, and a few men, whose
personal trajectories help us trace a cultural-political history of Florence that
provides a narrative that is not only separate from but complementary to—and
in some ways more clearly tied to political reality than—the standard
narrative of Medici-sponsored monody and dramma per musica. Readers who
are familiar with Cusicks scholarship will not be surprised to discover that
the alternative narrative (and indeed, the alternative historiographical
paradigm) that she offers is both feminist and gynocentric—and quite
reasonably so. The regency of Christine of Lorraine and Maria Magdalena
of Austria was both problematic and fertile for the Florentine body politic in
the second quarter of the seventeenth century, though as Cusick also observes,
modern scholars have unnecessarily tarred them with narrative metaphors of
decay. Cusick traces the womens court through what she could easily have
characterized as a rise and fall of political influence but instead more
subtly describes as a fluid relationship of exchange between female agents of
various social strata, a dynamic made all the more subtle by the necessity for
behavioral inwardness as a mark of female gentility in early modern Italy.

2.3 Cusicks
work thus dovetails with Kelley Harnesss systematic study of public spectacle
during the female regency in Echoes of Womens Voices, and Cusick
acknowledges her debt to and connection with Harnesss groundbreaking work.3 While Harness focuses on the outward political face constructed by the
regents through drama and music, Cusick turns her attention to the more subtle
private relationships among the members of the female court, especially as they
unfolded around the career and ambitions of The Daughter of Giulio Romano.

3. Virtù and Virtuosity

3.1 Cusick
describes the complex negotiations undertaken by Francesca Caccini to fulfill—not
for herself, but for her homonymous granddaughter, whom we meet at the end of
the book and whom she probably never knew—the life-long aim for which
she, and her father Giulio before her, had desperately struggled: recognition
as a member of the gentle-class, individuals considered nominally equal to
the prince in caste, if distinguished from that role by hierarchical
separation. We discover that Caccinis resource in this endeavor was her
careful balance of castità,onestà, and continenza—the
three necessary traits of the well-bred early modern Italian female—with virtù,
the noble masculine trait of self-mastery and self-display that had recently
become available through musical performance not only to lower-caste males
(with Giulio Caccini as an early self-styled non-noble virtuoso) but to
extraordinary females as well.

3.2 Cusick
elegantly shows us the process whereby the canny female rulers-in-all-but-name
of Florence (and foremost Christine of Lorraine, who in some ways is as much at
the center of the book as Francesca) first recruited and then groomed Francesca
to be the official voice of female-regent power, defined as sustaining,
approximating, but not usurping the official male virtù of the Grand
Duke. The web of history that emerges is far too rich to be given its due in a
short review; suffice it to say that it is both grounded in extensive,
scrupulous archival research and honed into a gripping narrative that may tempt
the reader (certainly induced this one) to skip over the middle chapters to
accompany Francesca, her benefactors, and her family into the sunset of their
powers and lives (and afterlives).

4.
Hearing Caccini in Private and in Public

4.1 Yet this
would be a mistake (or, perhaps, would then require the multiple readings that
this book so richly deserves), for the analytical chapters are where some of
Cusicks most novel and extraordinary insights are to be found. To be sure, she
has offered crucial analytical perspectives on some of Caccinis music in the
past as well.4 Here, however, in the middle four chapters of the book, she provides two
separate analytical-interpretative arcs that lead us through the two major
surviving examples of Caccinis compositional output: her Primo libro delle
musiche and La liberazione di Ruggiero dallisola dAlcina. As
Cusick observes in her introduction, this is a very limited repertory:
thirty-six songs and a seventy-five-minute stage work. Yet these two very
different musical assemblages—one designed for chamber song, the other
for the very public re-dedication of the Medici Villa of Poggio Imperiale above
Palazzo Pitti—allow Cusick to present readings that both draw upon and
push beyond established paradigms. In the process, she sets both clear models
and high bars for those of us who continue to struggle with creating analytical
language that does justice to the complexity of early seventeenth-century
Italian music.

5.
Learning a Romanesca of Ones Own

5.1 Cusick
considers the Libro delle musiche not merely as an extraordinary sample
of the second generation of new music pioneered—at least according to
his own account—by Caccinis father Giulio, but as a work that (just like
her fathers collection) demonstrates/embodies (or perhaps, envoices) a
pedagogical approach. Unlike that of her teacher-father, however, Francescas
book, Cusick argues, is specifically meant to train and envoice the
female professional singer for the musico-rhetorical work required by the
gynocentric court. Like her husband Grand Duke Ferdinando, Christine of
Lorraine chose professional singers to serve as sonic representations of
authority; Cusick leads us through Francescas book and shows us how, through mastery
of its resources, the young singer could gain the requisite skills to do so in
the complex publically private spaces governed by the female regents.

5.2 In the
process, Cusick dwells at length on the nuanced ways Caccini deployed various
aspects of the Romanesca (as she herself observes, the working title of the
book was for some time A Romanesca of Her Own, and while the current
title is certainly more transparent to the wide audience that this book
deserves, there are some of us who would have enjoyed the resonance). Other
scholars have both acknowledged and drawn from Tim Carters groundbreaking
discussion of the early-modern parameters of aria in his 1993 Music
Analysis essay;5 however, Cusick here takes the complexity of the concept to a new level,
providing extensive examples of how Caccini demonstrated the ways of
being/performing that were made possible by the aria di romanesca in her Libro delle musiche.

5.3 Cusicks
analyses are explicitly keyed not only to detailed and clearly explicated
visual musical examples (within the flow of the prose, rather than at the end
of the chapter, which greatly facilitates understanding; Cusick and her editors
at Chicago are to be commended for this choice) but also to tracks on the
accompanying CD, which contains selections from Caccinis music performed by
soprano Emily Van Evera and an accompanying continuo group. These are
marvelously expressive performances, which appear deeply informed by Cusicks
readings of Caccinis music, just as Cusicks own interpretations are
explicitly informed by discussions with Van Evera about the physical realities
of singing. The changing instrumentation in the continuo group from song to
song is not only tailored to the expressive requirements of the individual
texts but also demonstrative of the variety of ripieno textures available to
Caccini. While one might regret that more of the Libro delle musiche is
not included on the disc, one can also hope for a complete recording (a
double-CD, perhaps, with commentary by Cusick?) under separate cover at some
point.

6.
Staging the Power of Womens Voices

6.1 While the
first two analytical chapters concern Caccinis contributions as a
teacher-composer in a private frame, the second two consider Caccinis sole
surviving complete work for the stage, a demonstration of her more public
musical activity. Cusick not only describes the complex multi-stage event
(performed partly by professionals, partly by noblemen) of which La
liberazione di Ruggiero dallisola dAlcina was a part, but she also
unpacks at some length the political circumstances that Florences female
regents were both responding to and shaping through the sonic and dramatic
power of the event. Here Cusicks readings are in dialogue with those of
Harness, who also provides an analysis of selected passages from La
liberazione and an assessment of its political significance; a reader would
be well served by familiarity with both interpretations of this work, which is
not just the first opera by a female composer, but a rare example of a
surviving early modern balletto.6

6.2 Cusicks
analysis of the complex musical-expressive resources created by Caccini to
support the dramatic trajectory of the balletto indeed fulfilled this
eager readers twenty-year-old recollection of a mollis-durus contrasting soundscape, and—not surprisingly—the hermeneutic
approach has gained even further nuance with the passage of time. Several
scenes from the work are examined in detail from a melodic/harmonic
perspective, drawing on an expanded version of the analytical framework
developed by Eric Chafe.7 As in the chapters on the Libro delle musiche, these analyses are keyed
to excerpts on the accompanying CD, giving the reader a concrete opportunity to
follow Cusicks argument about dramatic-sonic power. Even with this, readers
should be aware that Cusick clearly expects a focused commitment on their part:
the analytical arguments are dense and complex, requiring a solid familiarity
(or the desire to gain it) with early seventeenth-century musical syntax.

6.3 Cusicks
hermeneutic approach to La liberazione is purposefully experimental and
provocative, drawing strongly on her own response to a modern performance of
the balletto for insights on its potential for gender-political work
that would have served the rhetorical needs of Florences female regents. While
admitting that I found this last strategy the least convincing interpretative
approach in the book, I would not claim that its insights are inherently less
valuable —Cusicks work pushes interpretative boundaries throughout, and
readers are likely to find some aspects of her project more consonant with
their own intellectual priorities than others, and to be fruitfully challenged
to consider the value of unaccustomed paradigms.

7. Performing
Francesca

7.1 It is a
long-acknowledged truism, though perhaps one not frequently voiced in print,
that scholars gravitate to topics that speak to their own sensibilities. Cannily
deploying a multitude of rhetorical devices, interrupting the Romanesca of
Caccinis life-narrative to let Caccinis expressive sound-manipulations tell
their own tale and then resuming it to bring the book to a close, all the while
showing the repetitions and variations that define both her subjects life and
the aria that she took on as her own expressive medium, Cusick also
performs as a virtuosa—but in the sense that the term inhabited
before the connotations of theatricality (and perhaps excess) acquired in the
generations after Caccini. Like her subjects (not only Francesca Caccini, but
her daughter and students and the patrons who opened up the gynocentric space
within which she operated), Cusick has wrested the performative control of
historiographical virtù away from its default connotations of masculinity,
articulating a vision of history and musical hermeneutics that amply fulfills
the promise of writing from womens lives presented in the Musical
Quarterly article with which she pioneered her discipline-defining
approach. Francesca would have liked singing for her.

References

* Andrew DellAntonio
(dellantonio@austin.utexas.edu) is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the
Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division of the Butler School of Music and Associate
Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Fine Arts at the University of
Texas at Austin. His foremost research interest is the process of listening—how
it has been characterized and fostered from the 1600s to the present and how
different modes of listening influence the social uses and cultural meanings of
music. His edited collection Beyond
Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (2004) and his
monograph Listening as
Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (2011)
are both available through The University of California Press.